Articles Tagged ‘Cd Reviews’

Amidst much Criticism and controversy, Joseph Boyden’s newest novel, The Orenda, was recently crowned winner of the 2014 Canada Reads competition. Boyden’s book, which explores French colonialism and its role in the collapse of the Wendat confederacy in the 17th century, beat out other excellent works of fiction. However, despite winning the prize, The Orenda has received a rocky reception and continues to be the subject of significant popular debate.

Mr Putin represents himself as a left-wing politician, but in reality he is rightwing. This is the master stroke of his PR. He wants to reform communal services, education and health, in a most libertarian way.

We are Legion not only interviews key figures associated with Anonymous but presents a fairly scholarly but riveting account of its origins, much of which should be of avid interest to the left. When so many gray-haired veterans of the left fret over when “fresh blood” will arrive, We are Legion makes it clear that help is on the way even if it does not exactly conform to past expectations.

The Harper Conservatives are going to great lengths to highlight the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, when the British and Americans fought for control
over the north. It is in this context that James Laxer has published his history of the war.

The Dark-Knight Rises is not simply an anti-Occupy commentary, but a profoundly reactionary film reinforcing the importance of benevolent capitalism and denouncing the possibility of revolution; the movie affirms a kind of bourgeois justice.

A lot has been said about The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises. However, there have been no reviews directly comparing the two films, their different conceptions of justice, and their subsequent messaging about politics and class struggle.

It has been a painfully long time since the opinion poll was fully assimilated into Canadian political life. In the arid and austere years of the 1980s, both federal parties began to outlay heaps of money to commission pollsters (an originally pejorative term) to not measure but control public opinion. Canadian politics has suffered accordingly. No stranger to this uninspired and faltering form of democracy, Judy Rebick, in her new book, sees the supple practices of Occupy Wall Street as the “deepest form of democracy I’ve ever seen.”

By the end of this century, coral reef ecosystems will very likely be extinct. Think about the magnitude of that statement for a minute,
requests ecologist and coral reef expert Peter F. Sale in Our Dying Planet.

Directed by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space, is a probing examination of modern-day transportation systems like container ships that make global trade possible—their impact on workers, the environment, and more subtly the quality of life for city-dwellers living under its influence. When the Communist Manifesto first appeared in 1848, most on the left would have agreed with its authors that the development described in these words was deeply revolutionary:

Published since 1963, Canadian Dimension is a forum for debate on important issues that face the Canadian Left today, and a source for national and regional politics, labour, economy, world affairs and art.